Overview

Esthela Calderón received her university degree from the Universidad de Occidente in León, Nicaragua, where she was born and raised. She is the author of several books of poetry: Soledad, which won the 2001 Juegos Florales Centroamericanos Belice y Panamá competition, Amor y conciencia (2004) and Soplo de corriente vital (2010), a pioneering collection of ethnobotanical poems. Her historical novel 8 caras de una moneda (2008) is about a family in Nicaragua during the years that led to the Sandinista revolution in 1979. Now in its second edition, the novel is being used in the General Education program at the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua in León. She is the co-author of Culture and Customs of Nicaragua (2008) published by Greenwood Press. For ten years, she was the Technical Coordinator for the International Rubén Darío Symposium, for which she regularly edited the conference proceedings. She also has served as the Secretary General of the Association of Nicaraguan Women Writers. She has been invited to give readings of her work throughout Central America, as well as in Spain at the Universidad de Salamanca, the Universidad Complutense and the Universidad de Alcalá de Henares. In the United States, her poems have appeared in prestigious journals such as World Literature Today (University of Oklahoma), Translation Review (University of Texas at Dallas: special issue on new Latin American writing), and Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas (Americas Society-New York).